Making Your Old Brain Young Again
As you age, your brain works more slowly and mental tasks take longer. This colourful supplement can not only stop that, it can reverse it!
A study published a few years ago found that, for many seniors, their brain didn’t just benignly slow down. An incredible 39% of people over 65 were experiencing serious cognitive issues.
But studies have shown that lifestyle choices can slow down the aging of your brain. A healthy diet can help. And one dietary choice is proving particularly interesting: blueberries.
An intriguing study of over 16,000 people aged 70 or more found that eating blueberries slowed down cognitive aging by 2.5 years (Ann Neurol. 2012 Jul;72(1):135-43).
Following up on this promise that blueberries make your brain younger, researchers conducted a 6 month double-blind study of freeze-dried wild blueberry powder and people between the ages of 65 and 80 who were experiencing cognitive decline. 44 of them were given 35g of wild blueberry powder every day, and 42 were given a placebo. Another 45 people who were not experiencing cognitive decline were also included as a reference group.
The most interesting result the researchers were curious about was processing speed because it is an element of cognition that underlies all other cognitive abilities. And they found that it worked. The blueberry supplement improved speed of processing compared to the placebo, especially in people who were 75 or older. The improvement occurred both at the neural level and the behavioural level. That means that information moved from neuron to neuron faster and that mental tasks were actually completed faster.
Remarkably, the people who took the blueberry supplement for 6 months were now able to match the performance of the group who had never experienced cognitive decline, suggesting that supplementing blueberry powder restores your brain to its earlier cognitively healthy state.
Nutritional Neuroscience. Sep 6 2022; doi.org/10.1080/1028415X.2022.2117475
